Tom Dutton

Sport: Football

Induction Year: 1969

University: LSU

Induction Year: 1969

By modern standards, his size would be rather ordinary for a football lineman. But when 6-3, 225-pound Tom Dutton showed up at LSU in 1912, he was a giant.

There was only one catch. He wasn’t a football player. Dutton hadn’t participated in the sport at Minden High School.

James K. Dwyer, a University of Pennsylvania graduate who became head football coach at LSU in 1911, wasted no time correcting that oversight. He built his team around a “Mutt and Jeff” combination of Dutton and Lawrence Dupont, a 5-7, 165-pound scatback from Houma.

It was a time of radical changes in football rules. The flying wedge was outlawed, as were the practices of pushing or pulling ball-carriers and interlocking arms for players running interference. But Dwyer, experimenting with an early version of the “T” formation, came up with a “kangaroo” play in which Dupont would crawl between Dutton’s legs. It was unstoppable on short yardage situations.

After spending his freshman season on the junior varsity, Dutton won all-Southern honors in his first year as a varsity player. He was especially effective in a 7-0 loss to Auburn, playing a “roving center” position on defense.

When he wasn’t playing football, Dutton excelled in track and field. As a sophomore, he set Southern records in the shot put, hammer throw and 56-pound weight—setting a school record in the shot put that stood for two decades before “Baby Jack” Torrance broke both the school record and world record.

He won All-Southern honors again in 1913, but met his match in the Tigers’ 45-6 rout of Jefferson College.

“They had a 135-pound halfback who drove me nuts,” Dutton recalled. “He ran circles around me. Later, he was ruled out because he was greasing his uniform. I would have hated to have me him under those circumstances.”

Although he graduated in 1914, rules in effect at the time allowed Dutton one more year of eligibility and he returned to the Ole War Skule in 1919 for post-graduate work and a final football season—this time, playing for Coach Irving Pray.

Dutton was captain of the 1919 tigers, who posted a 6-2 record. LSU allowed only five touchdowns that season—one apiece to Mississippi State and Tulane, and three to Alabama after Pray took Dutton out of the game in the fourth quarter to save him for the Tulane game.

Tulane carried an unbeaten record into that match-up, but Pray ridiculed the Green Wave at a team meeting.

He wrote “21” in giant numerals on the blackboard. “That’s how many points we’re better than them,” he told his players. “Now, I’m going to show you how we’ll do it.”

His strategy was to move Dutton from center to tackle. “We’re going to run Joe Bernstein behind Tom right at their tackle, Eva Talbot,” the Tigers’ coach said.

Bernstein, who had just returned to school after serving as a lieutenant in the Army in World War I, was a 210-pound power runner whose previous playing time that season was a brief performance against Arkansas in a 20-0 victory over the Razorbacks at Shreveport. Pray was saving him for the Green Wave.

Confident Tulane students had prepared a mock Tiger, hangman’s scaffold and coffin for a victory celebration. But Dutton’s blocking and Bernstein’s running sparked a 27-6 LSU victory that made Pray’s 21-point prediction come true, and delirious LSU fans destroyed the scaffold and carried the coffin back to Baton Rouge—where the Tulane “goat” was buried the following day with full military honors (three shots from a cap pistol).

One group of approximately 75 LSU fans rode the rails to that game, climbing aboard a freight train as it passed through Baton Rouge about 1 a.m. A brakeman threatened to call police when the train arrived in New Orleans, but the fan’s enthusiasm won him over. Later, he offered them the same transportation back to Baton Rouge. But they rode back in style, with their pockets full of money they had won from Tulane supporters.

Once again, Dutton won a berth on the All-Southern team.

Nearly 40 years later, Dutton served on the LSU Board of Supervisors, playing a role in Paul Dietzel’s stormy departure from LSU after the 1961 season.

On Jan. 5, 1962, Athletic Director Jim Corbett went before the board to request that Dietzel be released from his contract. “There is no reason to keep a man who does not want to stay,” Corbett said. After a heated discussion, Dutton introduced a motion that Dietzel not be released from his contract. It lost by an 8-5 vote.